Chris Schneidmiller
WC Monitor
9/18/2015
The Department of Energy’s Environmental Management Field Office at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is staffing up and taking other steps to ultimately assume full oversight of legacy waste cleanup operations at the New Mexico Facility, a senior DOE official said last week.
The EM office was established last March, just over a year after a waste container from the laboratory burst and leaked radiation at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in southern New Mexico. While the EM office had been considered beforehand, the February 2014 incident and official findings that followed highlighted the benefits of an organizational change that “could be responsive to some of those vulnerabilities and deficiencies that were identified in the event,” according to Christine Gelles, who until last week was the acting manager of the Los Alamos EM Field Office.
The office as of Sept. 11 had filled 17 of 26 authorized positions, with No. 18 arriving this week when DOE veteran Douglas Hintze took over as permanent manager. A larger organization is planned in future years, assuming funding is available, to allow EM to take over nuclear cleanup oversight at LANL and for the DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration and lab management and operations contractor Los Alamos National Security to focus on their national security mission at the site, Gelles said.
“That’s important because we need to become self-reliant. Right now we’re working very collaboratively with the NNSA Field Office; we’re dependent on their counsel, on their contracting officers, and very importantly, on their nuclear safety oversight office,” Gelles, EM associate deputy assistant secretary for waste management, said during a panel discussion at the ExchangeMonitor’s 2015 RadWaste Summit in Summerlin, Nev.
“Finally, in the acquisition world, we’re working hard to establish our own prime contract with the existing incumbent M&O, we call that a bridge contract,” Gelles said. “And it’s the bridge because we’re in the midst of a competitive acquisition process that will hopefully arrive no later than two years from now with at least one if not more prime contracts to conduct our cleanup moving forward.”
The Office of Environmental Management in February issued a request for information for potential contracts for legacy cleanup operations at Los Alamos, which includes transuranic waste management, groundwater and soil remediation, and facility decommissioning and demolition. At the time it said it hoped to seal a 12-24 month contract for Los Alamos National Security to continue to support the remediation work.
The lab’s waste management operations have been under high scrutiny following the release of a small amount of radiation in February 2014 at the WIPP site near Carlsbad. The investigation of the radiation leak ultimately led back to LANL, which suspended processing of legacy transuranic waste in May 2014.
The problem was found to be a combustible mix of nitrate salts and organic cat litter in the container and others that originated at LANL. “So we had an unstable waste package, and of course we all know what happened. It ultimately breached and resulted in contamination of the WIPP facility,” Gelles said.
She acknowledged the impact of the incident across the DOE complex, where facilities now cannot send TRU waste to WIPP while it conducts recovery operatoins. However, she said LANL’s efforts to rectify its waste management weaknesses have reached “a turning point that is about moving forward and leaving the past mistakes behind us, but learning from those mistakes and strengthening our programs and ensuring that our future resumption of TRU waste processing activities are fully responsive to all the insights we’ve gained through the litany of reviews that have been conducted.”
She highlighted the Department of Energy’s efforts to integrate findings from federal and state bodies into its program to eliminate vulnerabilities in management of nitrate salts and other TRU waste – material contaminated by transuranic elements such as plutonium or americium — that were a byproduct of decades of nuclear operations at LANL.
The DOE’s Accident Investigation Board last April cited a host of direct, root, and contributing causes for the WIPP incident, spreading the blame across multiple government offices and DOE contractors. It specifically tagged Los Alamos National Security for failing to establish a sufficient process for identifying and mitigating potential hazards and for processes that allowed “the generation of an ignitable, noncompliant waste.” The New Mexico Environment Department, meanwhile, called the lab out for a number of violations of its state hazardous waste permit.
The AIB issued a long list of judgments of need by various organizations, urging LANS, among other steps, to more stringently manage placement of secondary waste into TRU waste tanks, and calling for enhanced oversight by the NNSA Los Alamos Field Office of LANS’ environmental and waste management activities. In a December 2014 compliance order, NMED demanded a number of actions by the laboratory, including a thorough characterization analysis of all mixed TRU waste streams at the site and submission to the state of plans for remediation of certain waste storage containers.
Gelles said DOE is taking steps to address the issues cited by both the state and Accident Investigation Board. In follow-up comments on Friday, DOE said “The EM and NA field offices (EM-LA and NA-LA respectively) have developed a joint Corrective Action Plan (CAP) to ensure Accident Investigation Board (AIB) findings are adequately addressed. EM-LA and NA-LA, along with EM and NA headquarters, have been working with Los Alamos National Security (LANS) in developing their own CAP to in response to the AIB findings. When finalized, the EM-LA/NA-LA joint CAP and the LANS CAP will detail new and revised waste-processing procedures at LANL.”
The lab’s Technical Area 54 now holds about 1,300 cubic meters of transuranic waste following years of shipments to WIPP, DOE said. The department field offices and LANS “are working collaboratively with LANS to address the nuclear safety requirements and to ensure adequate safety basis is in place prior to resuming waste operations,” DOE said on Friday. It did not give a potential timeline for operations to resume.
The laboratory has also moved to increase the safety of nitrate salts at the lab, including supplemental cooling and “integrating all scientific, safety, regulatory and project activities over the next two years,” according to Gelles’ presentation. There is a direct connection between the reaction that occurred within the container at WIPP and the temperature in which the containers are stored, Gelles acknowledged. “We are very confident about the safety of containers, but temp cooling is an added measure or confidence while we work on science experiments and treatment proposals to gain confidence in the treatment plan.”
